A New Approach to Teaching Programming at Freshman Level in Mechanical Engineering

Abstract

Introduction to programming (MATLAB) course at Minnesota State University(MSU) has traditionally been a difficult class with high DFW rates. Traditional textbooks on MATLAB for engineers have examples which deal with problems the students have yet to encounter. Programming is a create/design level activity on Bloom's taxonomy. Students' perception of the course being difficult stems from having to achieve the create level, while missing all/many prior levels on example problems. This paper assumes that one of the underlying causes for this is that students are introduced to new mathematics and/or physics in examples, which makes it hard for students to focus on the programming aspect. New course material has been prepared which includes mathematical concepts from elementary/middle school to address the issue. Additional examples also deal with problems where students know the mathematics/physics of the problem until the evaluate-level of Blooms taxonomy. The effect of such material on students learning is addressed in this paper. Comparison is made on student success with the new material vs the historic student performance.